My flight from SFO to JFK. We were told we couldn’t disembark without showing our “documents.
Credit: Anne Garrett
Passengers of a domestic Delta flight from San Francisco to New York were told to show their identity documents to uniformed agents of the Customs and Border Protection agency upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy airport on Wednesday evening.
CBP officers are border agents, whose statutory authority is generally limited to international arrivals.
CBP agents inspected passenger identifications on the jetbridge by the door of the aircraft. A CBP spokesman insisted to Rolling Stone that this action is “nothing new” and that there is “no new policy.” But the unusual – and legally questionable – search of domestic travelers comes days after the Department of Homeland Security outlined its plans to implement President Trump’s sweeping executive order targeting millions of “removable aliens” for deportation.
Upon deplaning from Delta Flight […]
As a resident of California, and someone who often travels to Arizona and northwest states as well, I have been disturbed by the presence of the border controls that are located along I-5 and I-8 for a while now. I think they call them agricultural check points, but it is clear by the uniforms of the agents that are manning these posts as to what they are really looking for. It bothers me that it took immigration agents checking the papers of individuals on domestic flights for this to come to light, because I can’t drive to LA or Tucson from San Diego without a 50% chance of being stopped and checked! We’ll have to see if all of this outrage will actually amount to elected officials standing against this type of enforcement, or if this is just another attack against Trump that will fizzle away as soon as a new “liberal” president is elected.